[fellowniusmonk]

Yeah, cool, what categories do you have in mind? Sure we have bias but not infinite bias.

I'll start!

How about sea urchin destruction? I bet otters and sheepshead fish probably have little bookies keeping track and they know which species or virus hold the records! Very fun stuff! I bet they have little tablets to keep track of their records that go back thousands of years? Oh man, yeah, good point about species bias!

[squibonpig]

To kinda shortcut the bullshit, I think we should try to think about what cruelty is. I'd say it's a kind of celebration. The cruel animal is celebrating in the most visceral, most direct way the fact that they aren't in the position of the victim. Cruelty necessarily involves a kind of excess. You don't tend to find excess expenditure as much in the animal kingdom as you do among our species' section of it. That's why I feel like we exercise the most cruelty.

The records thing is silly. Records are necessarily aggregational, the top performer of many things. Everything sets records all the time at the specific unique thing it does. When we start choosing aggregations of things there's a combinatorial explosion in ways to choose them. We only get by by choosing an infinitesimal subset of those aggregations to consider, and thus to find records in by extension.